At 16 years of age, Brian Flanagan put forward a few mild suggestions concerning the origins of the universe. He committed this outrage at a Coe College Science Fair in his home town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Years later, Steven Hawking arrived at many of the same conclusions.
Brian then turned his attention to the venerable mind/body problem: How do our thoughts and ideas, our dreams and perceptions hook up with our gray matter?
His research soon led him into the deep foundations of quantum theory, where he discovered early sign posts left behind by Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Weyl and others. "Then I was off to the races."
Today, 40 years later, the world is paying attention to his heretical notions about mind and matter, thanks to a recent flurry of startling experimental results which confirm Brian's predictions.
"Obviously, this goes a long way toward underscoring the cleverness of the Almighty."
The time seems ripe for translating this theoretical work from the chalkboard to the work bench.
For the 'D' phase of this R&D venture, an initial round of angel investment seems to be the next logical step, in order to engineer a working proof-of-principle and recruit smart people in machine vision, robotics, management and finance.
The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in the study of the relations of thought and brain, is to understand why and how such disparate things are connected at all […] We must find the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directly on a brain-fact; and we must similarly find the minimal brain event which will have a mental counterpart at all.
~James
The characteristic of an n-dimensional manifold is that each of the elements composing it (in our examples, single points, conditions of a gas, colors, tones) may be specified by the giving of n quantities, the "co-ordinates," which are continuous functions within the manifold.
~Weyl
A field is simply a quantity defined at every point throughout some region of space and time.
't Hooft
When a state is formed by the superposition of two other states, it will have properties that are in some vague way intermediate between those of the original states and that approach more or less closely to those of either of them according to the greater or less 'weight' attached to this state in the superposition process. The new state is completely defined by the two original states when their relative weights in the superposition process are known, together with a certain phase difference, the exact meaning of weights and phases being provided in the general case by the mathematical theory.
~Dirac
For instance a star which we perceive. The energy scheme deals with it, describes the passing of radiation thence into the eye, the little light image of it formed at the bottom of the eye, the ensuing photochemical action in the retina, the trains of action potentials traveling along the nerve to the brain, the further electrical disturbance in the brain, the action potentials streaming thence to the muscles of eyeballs and of the pupil, the contraction of them sharpening the light image and placing the best seeing part of the retina under it. The best 'seeing'? That is where the energy scheme forsakes it. It tells us nothing of any 'seeing'. Everything but that.
~Sherrington
If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electro- magnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.
~Schrödinger
It is increasingly clear that the symmetry group of nature is the deepest thing that we understand about nature today.
~Weinberg
Can it really be true that Einstein, in any significant sense, was a profoundly "wrong" as the followers of Bohr maintain? I do not believe so. I would, myself, side strongly with Einstein in his belief in a submiscroscopic reality, and with his conviction that present-day quantum mechanics is fundamentally incomplete.
~Penrose
A theory that yields "maybe" as an answer should be recognized as an inaccurate theory.
~'t Hooft
Of course there will not be a return to the determinism of classical physical theory. Evolution does not go backward. It will have to go forward. There will have to be some new development that is quite unexpected, that we cannot make a guess about, which will take us still further from Classical ideas but which will alter completely the discussion of uncertainty relations. And when this new development occurs, people will find it all rather futile to have had so much of a discussion on the role of observation in the theory, because they will have then a much better point of view from which to look at things.
~Dirac
It is a most beautiful and awe-inspiring fact that all the fundamental laws of classical physics can be understood in terms of one mathematical construct called the action. It yields the classical equations of motion, and analysis of its invariances leads to quantities conserved in the course of the classical motion. In addition, as Dirac and Feynman have shown, the action acquires its full importance in quantum physics.
~Ramond
Furthermore, and now this is the point, this is the punch line, the symmetries determine the action. This action, this form of the dynamics, is the only one consistent with these symmetries [...] the symmetries of the theory have completely determined the structure of the dynamics, i.e., have completely determined the quantity that produces the rate of change of the state vector with time.
~Weinberg
It is just like the mathematics of the addition of vectors, where (a, b, c ) are the components of one vector, and (a', b', c' ) are those of another vector, and the new light Z is then the "sum" of the vectors. This subject has always appealed to physicists and mathematicians. In fact, Schrödinger wrote a wonderful paper on color vision in which he developed this theory of vector analysis as applied to the mixing of colors.
~Feynman
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
~Newton
